For a master class in orchestral programming, look to this week’s concerts at the New York Philharmonic.
Blink, though, and you might miss them. The program, while the best-crafted of the season so far, opened on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall and repeats only once, on Saturday. Led by John Adams, our greatest living American composer, in his occasional capacity as a conductor, it is a rarity for this orchestra: an evening billed as ordinary yet featuring mostly contemporary work, with the sole “classic” just eight decades old.
You could see the concert as parallel halves, each with a brief, spare 20th-century work (Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” and Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City”) followed by a hefty modern portrait of California (Gabriella Smith’s new cello concerto, “Lost Coast,” and Adams’s “City Noir”).
On a superficial level, you could also call it an evening of contemporary music. Of the four composers, three are alive: Adams, Pärt and the young, brilliant Smith. But even that doesn’t seem fitting for works that nod to centuries-old chant music and film noir.
Regardless, these pieces have been assembled, as well as conducted, with thoughtfulness and care. And as an audience member, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy. This is contemporary sound to dispel clichéd fears of abrasive modernism while never cheaply pandering to mass appeal. It’s just fundamentally good music.
Pärt’s “Cantus,” for strings and a chime, opened the program, its elegiac simplicity swelling from extreme softness to extreme strength. In its mournfulness, it would seem to set the tone for “Lost Coast,” whose title refers to a wild coastline in Northern California but also suggests environmental destruction; introducing the piece on Thursday, Smith pointed a finger at the “criminally inadequate climate action from our leaders.”
But “Lost Coast” complicates its sadness, even anger, with awe. These feelings have been at the heart of the piece in every iteration: as a work for solo cello and electronics in 2019, as an exhilarating studio album production in 2021 and as a concerto with orchestra last year. Always, the cellist has been Gabriel Cabezas, an old friend of Smith’s from the Curtis Institute of Music and a new-music veteran now making a welcome Philharmonic debut.
Above all, this concerto is a love letter. And love is never simple. Over 26 minutes, Smith evokes the beauty, terror and joy of the natural world; its freedom and unpredictability; and the precariousness of a landscape, both dangerous and endangered. The music opens like a vista coming into view, with Cabezas’s cello, airy and harmonic, the bow moving rapidly with a tremolo over the instrument’s bridge, gradually joined by the rest of the ensemble.
From there, Smith cultivates chaos. Her directions are descriptive (“even more bow pressure, scratchy, rough, raw raucous, wild, like a bad-but-extremely enthusiastic fiddler, exuberant, ecstatic”). Still, they invite creativity: “I like to hold the violin like a guitar here and pluck G string with thumb and D string with index or middle finger. But feel free to use whatever method you prefer.” The percussion section can use her “favorite A-flat metal water bottle,” though sadly that didn’t happen on Thursday.
That kind of liberty can be difficult for a traditional orchestra, and the Philharmonic often came off as tentative next to Cabezas’s lived-in ease. Adams had an authoritative sense of direction, but “Lost Coast” relies heavily on the ensemble playing it. Hopefully this one becomes more comfortable with Smith’s style over time.
The Philharmonic drew from its ranks for the solo parts in Copland’s “Quiet City.” Christopher Martin’s protagonist trumpet entered with a touchingly weak fanfare against desolate strings. He and Ryan Roberts, the orchestra’s eloquent principal English horn, engaged in a pas de deux of lonely souls shadowing each other before going their separate ways.
Originally written as incidental music for a 1939 play, “Quiet City” created a mood befitting Adams’s “City Noir,” which was inspired by the historian Kevin Starr’s descriptions of Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s.
Composed in 2009 for the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel (who will become the Philharmonic’s music director in 2026) at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “City Noir” is a book of postcards flipped through quickly for an ever-changing, expansive view of Los Angeles. And it was properly colorful on Thursday, the ensemble’s timbres held in balance by an often grooving Adams at the podium: the grand start, like opening credits, giving way to nervy jazziness that peaks with a Lynchian trombone melody in the second movement, and a propulsive finale of vignettes coming in and out of focus.
This was the first time the New York Philharmonic had played “City Noir,” but it didn’t sound that way. Joined by a veteran of the piece, Timothy McAllister, as a guest for the athletic alto saxophone part, the orchestra inhabited the score in a way it hadn’t in “Lost Coast,” while the composer himself led with vigor and discipline in equal measure, as he had all night.
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